The Fearless Benjamin Lay
 
I have a new friend.

He’s a dwarf (he doesn’t mind
being called this) and lives in a cave.
 
He’s what we would call a Quaker, though
he minds that term very much.
 
And he’s been dead two hundred years.
But I met him only the other week.
 
So many are lost, so many, even those
who gave small gifts to the world, a word,
a useful thing, an act of love. No history,
no footnote, retrieves them from the void.
 
But the book of this man’s life was a door
through which he strode, and greeted me.
His name is Benjamin Lay. He is alive.
The little man in the Quaker hat
has lived with me these weeks, and I
have had joy in his company. He sits
 
in my easy-chair, and tells me
that at the age of 20, he learned about slavery,
and at once decided it was wrong,
and he would fight it.
He knew no-one else who thought as he did.
Is it wrong to keep a herd of cattle?
 
He tells me of the quakes he caused at meetings,
loudly calling the slave-holding ministers
agents of the Devil, having his number on their foreheads.
 
At one meeting (he loves to recall this)
he held a bladder full of pokeberry juice,
drew a sword, slashed, and scattered blood-red juice
over all the nearby Friends. Message much resented,
but received. He doesn’t care
 
that they expelled him from their congregations,
a seed was sown that germinated
in a generation. I love this little man.
 
Read. He will walk through that door for you.



Maybe you don’t actually have to read the book, but this is it anyway.
 
Marcus Rediker: The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist  Verso 5 Sept. 2017